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Creating A Sense Of Urgency: Why Marketing Must Behave Like Sales

What’s the quickest way to prioritize a global marketing team and align an organization to create a culture of success? Quite simply, look at your sales team.

Sales departments operate under a near constant sense of urgency, which gives them an extraordinary degree of focus and the need to make decisions quickly. Salespeople are always striving to meet predetermined monthly, quarterly and yearly sales targets. For many people in sales, this process is intensified by the reality that their compensation is tied to meeting and exceeding those targets. As a result, members of a sales department (almost to a fault) have an intense focus on which next immediate priority, decision and step will better enable them to meet their goals. They also measure their results, review/adjust their strategies, and stay focused on their goals.

Let’s compare that reality to the one often experienced by those in marketing, for example. Most marketing departments have a long list of priorities and complex strategies from what can be a dizzying host of different internal and external clients. They must balance between being the convenient internal go-to for projects that span the gamut from the inconsequential to the most intensely public. Marketers also have to balance core business impact functions such as driving product adoption, pipeline and brand relevance, often resulting in being very loaded down with more projects than they can conceivably handle.

The result for both the marketing department itself and, really, all the internal tributaries that flow into it these types of projects is the kind of confusion that can make it difficult to maintain focus on objectives that matter the most: those that will ultimately drive sales. And with the velocity of today’s business, it’s all too easy for this to become standard operating procedure, as marketing maintains a dead sprint on a treadmill of work that will not demonstrably benefit the business.

If marketing is empowered to view its mission through a “sales-focused” lens, it will be able to focus its efforts on the marketing campaigns that meet two primary objectives: increasing velocity and adoption of new products introduced into the market and adding qualified opportunities to sales pipelines. Everything that marketing does, including driving brand relevance and awareness, should ultimately contribute to these two areas. In marketing, sales is my No. 1 customer. I have worked to have our teams talk less about brand impressions and numbers of people at events (all important and relevant) and more about qualified pipeline opportunities. This simple change better aligns us with sales and gives sales confidence that we “get it.”

Marketers also need to develop measurable goals that can be monitored regularly to allow for course corrections along the way. Sales leaders are constantly looking at trends and patterns in weekly forecasts pipeline, wins, losses, what products are getting traction, and so on, and using the information to adjust strategies along the way to make sure of a successful outcome. In marketing we now produce a dashboard that has daily, weekly, monthly and semiannual data refreshes for key metrics so we can monitor results and adjust if/as needed. If marketing can speak the same language as sales, that’s half the battle. And, of course, marketing sometimes might need to step out of its comfort zone and make decisions quickly to align with the fast-paced action happening in sales.

It is critical for members of sales and marketing to realize that their objectives are essentially the same. That realization not only is hugely transformative for the people in those departments, it also can have a major impact on the entire business. Amazing things happen when marketing and sales are in tune with each other. Very quickly, an internal alignment forms across an entire company that champions creating real benefits for partners and customers. Time-consuming distractions fall away, and often the wins start accumulating. Partners in particular cherish this synergy and alignment as extended sales forces.

And where to start doesn’t have to be complicated. For example, sales teams know that customer loyalty is primarily won through experience with a company and/or brand, and therefore the entire organization must be focused on consistent delivery of the brand promise. Marketing teams must take ownership of this need for consistency and work to provide coordinated strategies across marketing teams connecting directly with sales teams and functions. This coordinated effort will drive improved brand perception, which is the driver for customer acquisition/retention and partner loyalty. This integration should encompass an understanding of creative online and offline marketing strategies that balance sales enablement and brand awareness. The challenge for marketers is to align all of a company’s marketing resources to relevantly connect brands with consumers. Sales teams have been doing this for years, providing deep relationships and points of contact for customers.

Is an internally aligned, highly focused marketing organization that inspires different departments, divisions and teams to work together to deliver real, measurable results for clients and customers possible? Yes, with work, of course. If you want marketing to ultimately deliver sales, think like sales.

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Julie, great article and it shows how alignment with sales can start with small steps and grow at a pace that is comfortable for the organization into a transformation.

Your discussion about the need to put the customer in the center of the relationship is equally refreshing. Too often, teams are so focused on each other that they forget they exist for the customer. In successful companies, I’m increasingly seeing marketing as a core part of the selling process. Lithium, for example, has marketing play a key role in actual sales calls and presentations. They are shoulder to shoulder with sales all throughout the deal. The result is those two teams are very aligned. In fact the CMO and the head of sales sit in cubes next to each other – the better to banter back and forth.

You might find this article on the 6 best practices for alignment interesting. http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/6-best-practices-for-sales-marketing-alignment-a-bridge-over-troubled-waters-021733.php

If the business has a plan that starts with its goals and objectives, then focuses on strategies and tactics…the problems identified in this story are minimized if not eliminated. (Sure, someone will run in with a new project that just has to be addressed by marketing today…but there needs to be a process for evaluating new opportunities and deciding whether or not they are pursued.)

As for ‘acting like sales’, I have to admit that description made me throw up a little in my mouth. How about we all act like adults and professionals that are working together for the business goals and objectives via the strategies and tactics laid out before us?

After working for 3 decades, whenever I encounter an organization marketing is not focused on achieving business goals and objectives (“Marketing is responsible for leads, sales generates revenue!”), I know there is a huge opportunity for improvement. Why would a department focus on creating an expense – which is exactly what a lead is – when they get to remain employed and earn a living based on profitable revenue?

If the head of marketing thinks their job is lead generation, find a new head of marketing. And if the CEO thinks that marketing is about lead generation, keep on moving because that ‘leadership’ will hobble the organization.

100% agree MC that role of marketing goes beyond lead generation. However, I believe all marketing initiatives are still, at the end of the day, about generating revenue. Marketing HAS TOO look more long term at things like loyalty, brand awareness and brand advocation but in the end thay are still there to, with salees, create revenue and ultimately share holder value.

Great points on this article by Julie. Sales’ sense of urgency is derived from the fact that in most organizations (especially high-tech and healthcare) you find compensation tied to the sale. In many cases the majority of their compensation (50%+). If you are looking to truly accomplish the objectives she outlines, I believe giving marketing practitioners an “upside” to accomplishing their pipeline (and ultimately) revenue objectives would be a key strategy to accomplishing this. Behavior between these departments brings into question the compensation models as much as it does the individuals or leadership. It’s about time companies considered some kind of model like that if they really want marketing to behave like sales.

Great piece. One ingredient of alignment could certainly be driven by compensation. Marketing folks are typically not leveraged like sales people. Sometimes they might get an MBO bonus, but maybe that’s 20%. If 50% of their comp was tied to a combination of qualified leads (upper funnel) and new customer acquisition (effective sales enablement), I bet that’d make a huge difference.

Great post, Julie. As an award-winning marketing expert myself, I agree that Marketing need to think like an extension of Sales. As one CMO said to me “Marketing looks for Mr. Right and Sales looks for Mr. Right Now.”

Marketing also ought to own Voice of the Customer in my opinion and they should also own the responsibility of developing content that answers buyer questions.

YOU ARE SO RIGHT JULIE! Having been on both sides of the table I’m not partial to either sales or marketing, however, if marketing is to have as much juice as sales has in corporate America a sense of urgency would be nice but I would also add a sense of accountability as well. This is not to say marketing doesn’t hold themselves accountable, it’s saying there needs to be more urgency on proving their utility on bottom line profit results. I’ve always said Marketing cannot be successful without sales and vice versa! Thanks for the nice post! http://ah2andbeyond.com/brand-marketing-the-sales-professions-heart-beat/ www.ah2andbeyond.com